Matthew Powers
The guess the pronunciation mode would benefit from allowing multiple recognized answers. For example, the program insists on a /i/ sound in pretend but marks the equally common but more casual /ə/ as incorrect. Still fun, but the program should better reflect the way most native American English speakers pronounce words. Modern linguistics has done a lot to combat prescriptivist attitudes and it's frustrating to see this program advance those, even if by accident.
2 people found this review helpful
Bob The Minion
This app is great for TESTING yourself in various different ways, but it's not really designed to TEACH phonetics. Some pronunciations are fairly unpredictable, but that's mostly because English is wildy inconsistent. Overall, It's a great, free resource and definitely worth the download!
6 people found this review helpful
A Google user
Excellent. "Guess word" has been tremendously useful to me. This game just made me exercise in a way I've never before had the opportunity, I could watch videos, research, read textbooks and articles, but this gives a new way to understand pronunciation. "Guess pronuciation" I don't like it, it's too hard, because there is too many ways to transcribe or interpret in IPA any word, for example the schwa can go in a lot of the unstressed syllables of any words, there is words with more than 1 pronunciation. It would be better if it would say it's correct despite this errors, if it would detect it's a possible plausible transcription. It requires some algorithm but it shouldn't be too hard to add a minimal intelligence to filter the most obvious alternatives spellings. Request: Add much more words to "guess word" (such as 10000 most common).
48 people found this review helpful